So, i am frequently posting on the area and other places, yet no one ever replies. Either its cus my questions are dumb or they are just mean people hehe, but im sure there not. Anyways, when i post here, I always get a reply even if its "i dont know", so thanks guys.

I am working on a large scene and would just like some pointers on how other people may edit this. The animation is of two character in conversation. Now, i have animated each character in one timeline so whatever camera shot i want to use its works as no editing needs to be done. Now, is this a wrong way to do things, or would you lot animate it in bits then render that camera out. I hope you know what I mean.

Depends on the scene, really. I tend to animate things in little bits because I'll usually know the camera moves ahead of time and can thus tailor my animation to fit the camera. No point in spending time animating things that will never be seen. For example, if a character is in a face closeup, I won't have to animate the lower body.

This can be jarring sometimes though, as it's tough to get things to flow properly sometimes if everything isn't animated all together. For example, if two characters are in a fist-fight that will require multiple angles, it makes sense to just animate the whole scene and then pick the camera angles. Trying to get the motion right for each shot separately, then cut them together, might break the flow of things visually.

iwkya

61 posts

07 Jan 2010

So what you do when you have 2 rigs kinda talking to each other, do you render a camera angle of a bit of the animation then save the scene out and slap a different anim on and save that out as a different scene, or anim file etc.

If I'm doing a multi character shot I tend to keep it all in one scene and either have multiple cameras (better idea) or animate the shot camera in stepped mode. That's just me though, it's easier for my workflow when I can keep track of it all together.

iwkya

61 posts

09 Jan 2010

Ah kewl guys, thanks for the info, its great to hear peoples different techniques. At the min i am learning animation as by trade I model, but I decided to use CAT which is excellent, despite a few gimble locks (thanks Tyson btw). I wanted to get into anim without learning loads on setting up a bone structure and constraints etc, so CAT was great, but now i'm slowly getting there with understanding controllers and stuff. Im finding a lot more speed with my character anims so its getting easier to animate the whole thing then pick some cameras.

I know no one uses CAT here, but ther is one problem i do have sometimes that I prob the same as bones. When i left its foot platform up, hoping the knee will bend, it sometimes bends the wrong way lol.. Is there anyway to define in the IK options to contraint the rotation of a join so it only rotates on axis or two.